


sed erat fiducia dispar

by aliferlia



Category: Havemercy Series - Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-16
Updated: 2013-04-16
Packaged: 2017-12-08 16:54:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/763767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliferlia/pseuds/aliferlia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"They said, in after years, that we hated each other. I am not sure that we ever did." Not-really kinda-sorta almost-maybe Antoinette/Anastasia, because why not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sed erat fiducia dispar

**Author's Note:**

> ahahahahahahaha wow this goes absolutely nowhere. the timeline is fuzzy and I made most of it up entirely; if there are any major conflicts with canon, please forgive my foolishness and try consider it handwaved. title is from Met.XI.721, which is the Iphis/Ianthe section, again because why not; in context it translates as something like, "however, their hopes for the future were very different".

The trees seemed to be carrying stars in their arms that year: Thremedon never saw such an autumn before or afterwards, and I remember it still with a great and painful clarity. The mists that stood up white from the sea in the early morning to hide the city caught and held the sunlight until all the world seemed to be closed in a shining glass sphere, and only the very topmost spires of the great domed Basquiat, still so very new, could be seen flashing gold through the murk. Travelling through the Miranda streets in a rattling carriage with my aunt frantically dabbing lavender oil onto a pocket kerchief and pressing it to her nose to calm her nerves, I looked out of the window, up and up: past the neat hedgerows all spotted bloody with hawthorn berries and into the dry golden oak leaves, beyond them to the shining mists.

Once, in my childhood, I had lost myself in some second cousin or great-great-uncle’s stately manor house out in the countryside and promptly decided that the best use of my time would be to go exploring: and vividly I recalled standing on tiptoe in a forbidden room to reach a small glass globe at the edge of a mantelpiece. It was full of water and white glitter, so that when I shook it I set a miniature snowstorm swirling about the little jade trees inside. I broke it, of course, not long after I stole it. I have a way of doing that with things. Even knowing that, I should have liked to have all of Thremedon cast in minute bronze and mounted on a golden plinth, surrounded by a shining bubble of blown glass and filled with glitter and smoke. I was seventeen, then, as I trundled up the hill in my rich soft carriage, and within three months I would be married: I supposed I could demand it as a wedding present.

High in the Dowager’s second-best solarium, I sat with my ankles crossed and my hands neatly folded in their silken gloves: pretty white things that I had stitched myself with a discreet pattern of blue poppies and gold. I was a fashionable girl as well as pretty, for I knew well that a slender throat was nothing unless it was well-adorned, a smooth complexion and shining hair useless unless accentuated by just the right colour of brocade.

‘Your rooms will be ready within the fortnight, my dear,’ the Dowager was saying to me: she quite liked me, which had been unexpected, since all of Thremedon knew that she was a sour old thing, and I had been quite prepared to make nice to a harsh mother-in-law for as long as it took to win her favour. ‘Will you be quite prepared to make the move by then? I know it can be quite a fuss, uprooting one’s life wholesale.’

‘I think all should be in order,’ I said, brightly, as my aunt nodded vaguely and sipped at her rosewater with trembling hands: she did badly in palace interviews. ‘When a household is well-run, you know, and one trusts one’s servants, one can accomplish a good deal of things.’

‘Ah, servants you’ll have to learn not to trust, I’m afraid,’ the Dowager advised me. ‘I do miss the days when one could rely only on one’s old nurse and two good chambermaids, but these days one can’t do without a bigger household, and it just isn’t possible to make sure that all of them are trustworthy - although we certainly may try our best to be vigilant. We will be screening quite intensively any members of your household you bring with you, I must add - it’s regrettable, but necessary.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I completely understand. I can see that there is going to be a lot for me to learn.’

She regarded me frankly. She was not so old as I had first imagined, although she wore her age badly: certainly the keenness of her grey gaze was untouched by her years, and although she resembled her son very closely, there was a degree of practicality in her that my fiancé had always lacked. I had known as soon as I met him that he was a schemer, and a brilliant one at that: never content to trust in the ways of the past, pushing always to leave his mark on the city in some way, young though he was at barely twenty-nine: he demanded new policies, new cabinet members, new treaties. His mother was more pragmatic: she saw no need to take to an idea simply because it showed the allure of novelty.

‘There is a great deal for you to learn,’ she told me now. ‘And you will learn it, because there is no other option for you. Nico’s battlefield will soon span a continent, I fear, but yours is to be the Bastion itself: and a small keep is often far harder to defend than a large plain.’

I wanted very badly to ask, _Will we go to war, then?_ \- but that would have shown only my youth. In any case, I was saved from having to answer her by a sharp rap at the door. The Dowager startled: then, as though to an announcement, said aloud, ‘Oh, very well - let her in!’

One of her attendants unlocked the pretty pinewood doors - very fine things they were, white and green and gold, equipped with dainty enamelled doorknobs - and bowed low as a woman swept into the room. I remember that she wore a dress of what seemed to be cold glass, short-sleeved and simple, gathered beneath the bust in the very latest fashion with a pretty chain of golden stars before falling loose to her silver shoes. On anyone else, such a dress would have seemed modest, even retiring: she wore it as though it were a warrior’s armour. Her complexion was dark, her hair darker, her eyes as brown as autumn. I had never seen anything so beautiful in all my life.

‘I’m very sorry to interrupt, my lady dowager, but Nico has returned and wishes to speak with you alone most urgently,’ she announced, in low, clear tones. ‘It cannot wait.’

Displeasure passed briefly over the dowager’s face: but other than that, she nearly faltered, and it was with perfect politeness that she said to me, ‘I apologise, my dear, but this will have to conclude today’s meeting. You may linger in the palace as long as you like - I can organise for one of my ladies to give you a tour of the gardens, if you would like? I understand you are not well acquainted with them, and soon all the best flowers will be gone for the year.’

I think she must have thought that I was offended, for I took several seconds to answer. I was watching the woman in the glass dress. Oh, it was only silk, of course - but such silk! In the light from the high windows, her hair shone dark as burnished gold: oak leaves moved and moved behind her. She turned to me quite suddenly, her dark eyes locking with mine. A taste like blood came into my mouth. I thought for a moment that I was standing outside among the autumn winds, halfway off the ground and flooded all through with dry thundery sunlight. Too late, I saw the heavy golden badge at her breast: an ornate V, fronded and embossed, that linked her belt of stars. For the first time since I was a very young child, I swallowed and dropped my gaze.

‘Perhaps I should walk a while with the Lady Anastasia,’ she suggested.

It was a polite gesture, and a clever one: for as she had known I would be, I was flattered, and agreed with a nod. I soon realised her true aim. A woman of her importance would not have been sent to run errands between a king and his mother: but a woman of her particular resourcefulness might casually volunteer to, in the hopes of being afforded an opportunity to gauge her newest rival. The mists had begun to lift, leaving behind a bright, dusty day full of a strange heat that seemed to have burned itself into me like a fever. I had not stopped blushing since I had first seen her: my cheeks fairly stung with it, and my throat felt close and dry: and yet, as we wandered the gardens together, she made sure to ask about my fiancé first of all.

‘Nico did very much want to meet with you,’ she told me, as though doing me a favour. ‘He sends his regards, and hopes he will be able to see you next week. He seems quite fond of you.’

I did not want to talk about Nico, particularly not if she was going to throw his name about so casually. She was doing it to hurt me, I could see. I was well-used to that kind of scheming among girls, and I wasn’t going to stand for it. I remember feeling disappointed: I hadn’t wanted her to be cruel. I had wanted, childishly, schoolgirlishly, to be her friend. That strange, thundery touch of magic moved briefly through my mind once more, and I started, found her brown eyes fixed on my face: in a sudden panic, I remembered the badge at her breast, and flushed all over again, furious with myself for forgetting. I would have to be more disciplined.

‘I think we have the potential to be great friends,’ she said, mildly. ‘I hope we shall, at any rate. As for Nico - well, you’ll soon learn to manage him. But come - he is elsewhere, and this is a lovely garden, and we have endless other things to speak of.’

She had pulled my thoughts clean from my head. I started shaking with the shock of it: my hands felt strangely heavy. I put one foot carefully in front of the other and ducked beneath an archway of browning roses, barely waited for her to follow. ‘Do you - can you - do you do that all the time?’ I asked, half terrified, half very angry indeed. ‘Because I hardly think it’s - well, it isn’t _right_ -’

She touched my elbow: I flinched away. She did not seem surprised. There was true remorse in her eyes. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That is, I do try my best not to. I - am young, yet, and I can’t always hold it off. It is as though a book were open in front of you, written with large clear letters, and you were staring straight at it: you couldn’t help but read some words, could you? Not unless you closed your eyes: and that is very difficult, for me.’

I would hardly have thought of her as young - she must have been at least seven or eight years my senior, and from her composure and regal manner I knew her for a seasoned veteran of the Bastion - but I supposed that any Talent was an art that required a lifetime’s hard work to perfect, and most especially the craft of a velikaia. ‘It must be awful,’ I said, tentatively. ‘Especially here - especially here, it must be - isn’t it dangerous for you?’

The look of surprise had already crossed her face several moments before the words left my mouth. ‘I suppose so,’ she allowed. ‘But come, we seem to have waded clear into the deeps of our conversation without even trying the shallows. I am very pleased to meet you, and confident that you will do well here at the Bastion.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, flushing. She offered me her arm. With no small amount of hesitation, I took it. ‘I do like your dress,’ I added, haltingly, after a moment. She smiled. It was watching morning rise in her face. ‘It - well. It makes you look like someone out of a fairy tale, like -’ And here I blushed even more, because I knew that she would already have seen what I wanted to say: ‘It makes you look like Psyché, about to be stolen away by Cupidon.’

She laughed aloud: the corners of her dark eyes creased up, and she pushed a tendril of hair from her face. I wanted, suddenly, ridiculously, to pick one of the pale roses and settle in her hair. ‘That’s a very kind comparison,’ she allowed. ‘I didn’t know you liked fairy tales.’

‘It’s my favourite,’ I said, because it was. ‘Did you ever see - there was a beautiful painting on show in that little gallery on the Amazement a few years back - a very lovely depiction of Psyché, in just such a dress, with hair just like yours, in that lovely Ramanthine style -’ For that was how she wore her hair even then, and I thought it quite a strikingly old-fashioned and sophisticated style, without understanding its political implications.

She did not seem at all offended, only laughed again, and said, ‘Ah, well, that particular artist - a man I knew, once - he had cause to be quite the Ramanthine supporter, and he based that Psyché on a friend of his.’

I blinked a moment, then gasped aloud. ‘No!’ I said. ‘Oh, surely she wasn’t painted in your likeness? In _your_ likeness? Oh, it’s one of my very favourites! You posed for it?’

‘I did,’ she said. ‘The artist was a friend of my old uncle’s, you understand, a lovely old man who’d been like a grandfather to me since I was little. At the time, seven or eight years ago, I was having all sorts of offers from poets and artists who wanted to paint and write all sorts of silly things about me, and he was a _very_ old-fashioned dear and thought that it having so much attention from so many gentlemen wasn’t at all proper: and so he decided that he would put me in a painting so perfect that everyone else would put aside their brushes in artistic despair and leave off pestering me.’

‘Did it work?’ I asked, and laughed when she raised her eyebrows and shook her head. ‘Oh, I can’t imagine being asked to be someone’s muse! I’ve only ever had to sit for boring family portraits. They’re _horrid_.’

‘Oh, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to be bored silly by finicky portrait-painters,’ she warned me, patting my hand. ‘Not only official ones, either - you’ve such a lovely face that you’ll inspire poets and artists and balladeers all across Thremedon!’

I was touched, but knew the flattery for what it was: I was used to what I thought of, sadly, as the sly backhanded compliments that women reserved for other women they had resolved to hate. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I murmured, faintly.

‘But I mean it,’ she said, stopping to take both my hands and look quite frankly into my eyes. There was not a trace of cattiness there, no falsity, no guile. I had not understood that that was possible. ‘You are beautiful, and you are clever, too. You’ll find it all very tedious after a time - but you were made to be adored, I think, and you certainly deserve it.’

I could not breathe. ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling very small, and very foolish: but somehow also the littlest bit more graceful, if someone so wise and worldly as she could find it in herself to believe in me. ‘Oh, but I’m only - I’m just -’

‘Not _only_ ,’ she corrected me gently. ‘Not _just_. You are -’

‘Antoinette!’ a voice called, and then the Esar was there, pushing his way through a spray of roses and looking rather handsome with the petals all scattered through his hair. ‘Antoinette, are you - oh, my lady!’

I will never forget the way his face changed when he saw me: he went from someone open-faced and real to a sweet, smiling portrait of a prince in barely a second. Antoinette dropped my hands as though they had burned her, took a few courteous steps back as Nico came to meet me. He bowed before me, as was proper and charming, and I bobbed my best curtsy in return: but by the time I had straightened up, his eyes were already searching for hers over my shoulder.

That was the day that she and I both understood it: we could never be friends.

*

My wedding was perhaps the single greatest show of decadence seen in Thremedon for the past century: doves and white stallions and great wedding feasts for the public sponsored by the Bastion, elaborate magical tricks performed by the younger and flashier members of the Basquiat, even fireworks somehow obtained from the Ke-Han, which would otherwise have been _very_ illegal, and which everyone enjoyed in the way that a child enjoys stolen sweets. My own dress was a ridiculous thing, gold and white brocade layered so stiffly that even I, who prided myself on my ability to dance gracefully in the tightest of bodices and the heaviest of full skirts, had difficulty walking. It was slashed here and there with rich imperial red, which was not at all my colour. It was early spring: frost clung still to the windowpanes, and I remember standing shivering in my nightshift, hopping from foot to foot on the cold floor, as four girls struggled to heave the dress into the room.

The first few years were full of balls and parties. Friends I had in the hundreds. Everyone clamoured to listen to my opinion on art, on poetry, on the latest plays, on this courtier’s affair, on a famous captain’s fall from grace. I was never particularly witty, but they all laughed anyway. My opinions on trade, on the danger imminent in the Kiril Islands, on the rumours of Ke-Han spies already infiltrating our borders, were never sought, though I was learning a great deal about such matters. I knew of Nico’s strange obsession with the magicians, and his especial favouring of those whose Talents allowed them to work with metal: I knew of his midnight consultations with smiths and glassblowers from as far afield from the other end of the empire, with uncultured madwomen like the infamous Sarah Fleet.

I never spoke of any of it. I commented instead on the latest fashionable dancer, on the new soprano at the opera-house and her scandalous carryings-on with half the chorus. All information was value. Any gossip was potential ammunition. I had always had a quick memory and a good eye for strategy. I learned everything there was to learn about the Thremedon nobility, just in case the day came when I might need to topple a certain politician to preserve some plan of Nico’s, or have a courtier exiled before they could betray some great secret. I stopped telling Nico of my discoveries quite soon: he took little interest in them, and I could see he felt that my prattling on about court intrigues was womanish and silly. Instead, I worked quietly to further his interests, cultivating a court full of trusted supporters and striving to keep them loyal. I saw no difference between making an especial point of being friendly and welcoming to the young wife of a man who had trade in steel and copper, and between struggling for hours to hammer out a business deal, backed up with subtle threats and generous promises: an ally was an ally, regardless of the means of their acquisition.

Still she remained in the background: Antoinette, moving through the back of a room here and there, sitting quietly in a library, disappearing for months at a time, returning for a scant half-hour to a ball. She would arrive in the simplest, most beautiful dress imaginable, which half of Thremedon would be copying for the next year: she would greet her friends calmly and pleasantly, as though she had not been absent for the better part of the last season, and make clever conversation about topics about which she could not possibly have had knowledge: and then she vanished again, off on some mysterious errand for Nico. She was a spy, she was a courtesan, she was a witch - no one understood the true nature of her work.

There was one such ball - years and years ago, when I was barely twenty-one, already very aware of how little power I had over any aspect of my life, but not quite yet so desperate as to have given in to melancholy. I enjoyed the music and the dancing most of all - I would go whirling about the room in some laughing man’s warm arms, encourage my giggling ladies-in-waiting to place little bets on which young nobleman asked me to dance the most in one night, feel immensely proud at having worn out yet another pair of silken slippers.

‘Oh, Ana, you are quite the dancer, aren’t you?’ Nico would say, whenever he noticed the snapped heels and broken soles: and would take my hands and draw me into his lap, tap me on the nose. ‘Are you certain you haven’t been enchanted by a wicked fairy intent on ruining Volstov by forcing us to spend all our resources on new shoes?’

But he always bought me new ones: made a point of indulging me in that regard, so that no one could accuse him of being inattentive. I do believe, even to this day, that he liked to see me happy. I know he liked to watch me dance. I know he thought me beautiful.

I remember slipping from the ballroom in a stumbling hurry in search of emergency hairpins, dragging one of my girls behind me: I think it was Adeline, a little dark-haired girl, who was giggling madly about something that one of the footmen had told her, and trying in between giggles to say, ‘Oh, wait, wait, milady, wait a moment, I think I’ve - yes, here! I’ve a spare pin!’

I had had several glasses of wine, and was flushed and happy: I stood impatiently with my hair spilling over my face as she began to poke at my scalp with pins, said, ‘Honestly, Adeline, surely whatever it is can’t be _that_ funny -’

‘But it _is_ ,’ she insisted, trying valiantly to straighten her face and failing. We were alone in one of the side-corridors of the great ballroom, a narrow place of panelled wood painted white and hung, at my express direction, with tapestries and drapes in blues and soft greens, the walls decorated here and there with a tasteful watercolour amid the golden facifers. Music spilled in, a jaunty minuet played by flutes and viols, so that I had to strain to catch Adeline’s words - ‘The _gardener_ ,’ she said, ‘you know, milady, the new one - well he _swears_ he heard a _dragon_! He heard roaring and saw smoke from that bit of the orchard where you can see down into the Basquiat - but Ermenegilde says that four whole bottles of brandy went missing from the kitchen! _And_ then -’

There came the creak of hinges, and we froze, Adeline still giggling, I halfway between impatience and mirth myself. The last person I would ever have thought to see there in that close little passageway was Antoinette, for I had not even known that she was in attendance. Her dress was a curious shade of russet, beautifully overlaid with sheer golden silk: her throat was clasped with the most delicate of ruby chokers: subtle and elegant as always, several thousand times lovelier than my own heavy blue silks. Adeline gave a small hiccough of fright and hurried to curtsy: hairpins scattered loud all across the tiled floor. ‘Oh!’ she cried, miserably, and fell to her knees to pick them up.

I looked at Antoinette, and she looked at me, and then suddenly the corners of her mouth were twitching up, and I felt heartened. ‘You _are_ a silly dear,’ I said affectionately to Adeline, and knelt to help her retrieve the last of the hairpins, took her hand to help her up.

‘Thank you, milady - I’m terribly sorry - ah, milady Antoinette, I -’

For Antoinette had held out her hand for the pins, and was saying, ‘My dear, if you will give me those, I will see to Her Highness’ hair. In the meanwhile, I would be much obliged if you would run and find the Margrave Aurélien, and tell him that all has gone as planned. Can you do that for me?’

Adeline nodded, red-faced and awed, and dashed away through the doors with a clatter of heels. Left alone with me, Antoinette offered me a smile: I sobered immediately, feeling my heart give a curious _thud_ : but all she did was lift up a hand to push the trailing hair from my eyes, and say, ‘Let’s get that nicely pinned up, shall we? And before you say I needn’t bother, it’s been ages since I so much as saw you, let alone spoke with you. I should be glad of a chat.’

So we found a small painted couch and sat down together as the minuet came to an end and a slow, lilting sarabande took its place. She dressed my hair from scratch, unpinning it entire and brushing it out with a little sandalwood comb she said she kept always on her person, then piling it up again with considerable skill. The rhythmic push and pull of her clever fingers against the base of my skull was oddly intimate, somehow.

‘You do have such lovely hair,’ she murmured.

A shiver ran down the nape of my neck. Swallowing, I looked down at my hands clenched into the watered silk of my skirts. I was wearing a ring on almost every finger that night, heavy, ornate things with wide bezels, and still they did not hide the raw red marks of my nervousness. I would have to take to gloves eventually, I knew. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Are you - well?’

‘I am,’ she said. ‘And yourself?’

‘Very well, thank you.’ I paused. The music was sweet and sorrowful, the light from within as it spilled through the chinks in the door uncertain. ‘You are such a mystery, you know,’ I told her, suddenly deciding to play the coy, naïve card: it had been my standard persona for months and months at that point, and knew no other way of obtaining information. ‘Why, you disappear so often that for all we know you could be a fairy creature - a djinn, or a pari, or some kind of sprite! And then you reappear again as though you had never been away. Nobody ever knows what you’re up to.’

‘Since a good deal of very boring but very tediously secret business relies on my keeping it a secret, that’s likely for the best,’ she said, drily. ‘Although it seems I have failed wholly at being discreet. Does the _entire_ Bastion think I’m a spy?’

‘Oh, only about half,’ I told her blithely. ‘There’s a solid thirty-five per cent who think that you’re a magical construct summoned up by the Basquiat as a go-between, so that they won’t have to deal with Nico. Oh, and according to the latest rumour I’ve heard, you’re an exotic dancer from the other end of the continent.’

She took me by the shoulders and manoeuvred me around on the couch so that she could inspect her handiwork: reached out one elegant finger to angle my face towards the light. ‘Yes, that will do nicely,’ she said, settling one last curl into place and nodding to herself. ‘And that last rumour would be quite impossible, by the way, given that I am a terrible dancer.’

I felt my eyebrows shoot up. ‘Surely you wouldn’t tell your Esarina such a shameless lie,’ I said: by now well-aware that I was flirting quite terribly, and unable to stop. It was the same as plying her for information. It was what I _did_. That her skin seemed blazing hot, that her ankles were tangled with mine, that her lips were full and red - all of that meant nothing. She was a well-known beauty: of course I should appreciate that. ‘I’m certain you’re a marvellous dancer. You must be!’

‘ _Must_?’ she asked, chuckling. ‘Why _must_?’

‘You’re renowned as the most accomplished woman in Thremedon!’ I told her. ‘You can do _anything_! Of course you can dance. I won’t stand for such deception, you know, I truly won’t. It’s not becoming.’

Still chuckling, she shook her head, so that the rubies threw bloody points of light all across her throat. ‘I would never lie to you, Highness,’ she said, quirking one eyebrow, ‘and certainly not about anything so deathly serious as dancing.’

The mournful sarabande came to an end, and a cheerful little gavotte started up in its place. My heartbeat quickened. The wine had not yet worn off, and it, combined with the nearness of her skin, the brilliance of her eyes, made me bold and giddy and full of mischief. ‘Well, then, prove it,’ I said, standing a little uncertainly, and extending a hand to her. She stared up at me: I felt the touch of her mind to mind, crackling like static electricity on the borders of my thought. ‘Oh, come, Mistress Velikaia,’ I said, teasingly, ‘you need hardly to resort to your magic to understand this! I’m simply asking you to dance.’

Blinking in complete amazement all the while, she allowed me to pull her to her feet: whereupon, greatly daring, I settled my arm about her waist and drew her close, clasped her hand as though she were a pretty girl and I a noble gentleman. It was nothing I had not done with my sisters and cousins a hundred times in childhood while training for my future at Thremedon: but as she tossed her head back and straightened her shoulders, her eyes meeting mine as though in response to a challenge, and suddenly I knew that this was a very different kind of dance indeed.

Suddenly ablaze with my own bravery, I counted, ‘One - two - three - _four_ and -!’ and swept her off down the passageway. She had lied: she was a perfectly passable dancer, who knew the way of it well enough not to have to watch her feet. Yet it was clear that it was not the sort of thing that came to her naturally, for there was an aggressive stiffness in all her steps, as though she were reciting poetry learned by heart in a foreign tongue she hated. I stepped back quite suddenly, just enough to pull her into a careful turn that ended with her half stumbling in my arms, very much surprised, then led her spinning back up the passage until she was laughing aloud in helpless delight.

By the time the gavotte ended, we were both of us out of breath and half-hysterical with laughter. We collapsed against a wall, clutching at each other’s hands and giggling madly. I had never seen her so _young_ : she had lost all her dignity and poise, and her face was scrunched up as she pushed tears back from the corners of her eyes.

‘You, Highness,’ she said, breathlessly, ‘ _you_ are the fairy creature. You were enchanted to dance well at birth, weren’t you? Fairy godmothers came along and gave you hair like sunshine and eyes like cornflowers and the ability to dance like a maniac. It’s not fair to the rest of us.’

‘Fairy godmothers!’ I said, scoffing. ‘Nothing half so romantic. Three anxious maiden aunts with a dreadful pince-nez apiece and one very bored stable-boy who could play the fiddle.’

She snorted again, doubling over with laughter: then straightened up, reached out her hand as a gentle and pretty minuet that I particular loved started up. ‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘if you’re a fairy princess, and I’m a mysterious spy, you may as well share your knowledge. Teach me.’

‘Oh!’ I said, in surprise: but drew her close all the same, flushed and breathless though we both were, and counted us into a minuet step.

There was hardly space for it in that narrow corridor, but we managed it well enough: laughing at each other, giving up halfway through when our feet became irreparably entangled and beginning to improvise our own silly steps. She spun me about in an unexpected whirl that nearly saw me fall over entirely, then hurried to steady me, holding me close as I clutched at her shoulders and giggled. Her skin was so very hot, the heavy rise and fall of her breasts beneath the thin silk of her lovely dress somehow quite intoxicating: my wrists were pressed up sharp against her collarbones.

She said, softly, ‘Are you all right? I didn’t mean for you to fall.’

I leaned our foreheads together, still flushed, still dizzy, still grinning. Her hands were at my waist. I wanted my hands to be in her hair. ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ I said, and put my mouth against her mouth.

A door banged. She lurched away, eyes wild, then did a very strange thing, so swiftly that it could only have been born from the purest instinct: she grabbed me by the arm and forced me bodily behind her, squaring up her shoulders as though trying to shield me. It was only a pair of footmen, of course, come to look for me, since it must have been a good twenty minutes or more since I had disappeared with only a serving-girl to protect me, but still Antoinette stood in front of me. In the barest instant, she was become once again the sombre, poised woman that had so intimidated me: flushed cheeks and wild hair notwithstanding, she drew herself up into something quite frighteningly proud, while I cowered behind her. She should have been a queen, I thought - she should have been the Esarina, not me. I remember how she started as I thought that. I didn’t understand it at the time.

‘Gentlemen, if you were looking for Her esteemed Highness, I think you’ll find she’s quite safe,’ she announced, in that rich ringing voice of hers. ‘She was simply taking some air. Will you escort her back inside? I have matters to attend to elsewhere.’

I don’t think we ever spoke of that evening again. We were still children then, after all. Children make mistakes: it is kinder not to remember them.

*

They said, in after years, that we hated each other. I am not sure that we ever did. I know that she never hated me, for one thing. I should have preferred it if she had. Any passion at all would have been preferable to the sweet, bland tolerance she showed me for so long. Our dealings were few and far between, our conversations for the most part carefully innocuous. I, at least, genuinely liked her, and knew that I could not afford to indulge this liking for someone who could at any moment turn on me. I had learned this from Nico. I was useful to him: I was beautiful and refined and well-born, and, on the few occasions he did choose to share his thoughts with me, I could advise him intelligently. Still he did not trust me, for he knew that I might betray him at any time. The excitement of the first few years at court was fading, and though well-loved, I was no longer quite as fashionable as I had been while still a novelty in Thremedon: I quite failed to fall pregnant, or start up a scandalous affair, or throw the kinds of lavishly inappropriate parties that would at the very least have made me infamous. From Nico I wanted only companionship. I wanted only to know that I had some true value. I was very lonely.

I would have been endlessly flattered to know that Antoinette considered me her enemy.

There was no one terrible moment when I understood that she was, or had been, Nico’s mistress (I still cannot say with any accuracy when their affair ended, though I know it began not long after her seventeenth birthday). In some way, I had known it since first I met her. I came to appreciate it more thoroughly much as I came to know all the other intricacies of court, as I absorbed one piece of new information after another, as I learned how to look at a man and list all his many scandals and importunities in my mind while smiling at him and agreeing quite cheerfully to save a dance for him. Perhaps I looked at Antoinette and Nico one afternoon as they sat together discussing policy and suddenly understood the full truth of all the rumours, but if I did, I cannot remember it now. I had never expected fidelity from Nico. I had never expected very much.

There was, however, one _very_ terrible moment indeed when I first learned of their child: his name and parentage spoken laughingly by one margrave to another as I paused for a moment with my fingers on the enamelled handle of the seventh-floor music room in the east wing. I remember I was wearing two heavy rings, both in gold and sapphire, for by that time I had come to adopt blue and gold as my signature colours, and had also picked up a bad habit of plucking at my  knuckles when anxious, and that rings helped in concealing. I remember I stared at them as I heard the Wildgrave Ozanne, then very young and reckless, say, ‘Well, it’s not as though our dear Nico’s the only Esar to have been careless with his dalliances, but really, a child by _that woman_ \- he’s a fool, in my opinion, a fool or bewitched.’

I was with little Adeline at the time: and to see her eyes widen as I flinched back from the door was shameful. To have her pitying hand on my elbow as she carefully hurried me away was worse still. I was a thing to be protected, a thing to be coddled: never once was I attributed any measure of bravery.

Worst of all, it was confirmation that the fault lay with me, and not with Nico, in failing to produce an heir. I supposed I could have stood it otherwise: but to have it known that I was barren, a cold useless unmotherly thing as fertile as glass, was awful. It was not the lack of children. I have always rather liked them, in an aesthetic sense, and certainly there were times when I longed for nothing more than a baby of my own to gentle and nourish, if only because I hoped that a child would, at least, be my certain ally, and love me where no one else seemed to. As the years passed, I began to perceive more fully the nature of my failing. This had been my task. I had spent my life carving myself into the image of a ruler’s wife. I had been found lacking. The fault was not even my own, but my body’s. Over this one, last, most crucial thing, I had no control.

Dmitri was, of course, the worst-kept secret in all of Thremedon. He grew up well, I suppose, and made his way for the most part on his own. He appeared at court occasionally in his youth, but for the most part Antoinette would choose to leave the city to visit him in the manor house out in the countryside where she had him kept safe. I was introduced to him for the first time at a ball when he was perhaps twelve: a fine boy, very courteous, quite clever, who bowed to me as he should and held polite and engaging conversation with me about the opera he had attended that afternoon. Unobserved by most of the court, we sat together in a corner of the painted ball-room on dainty chairs and discussed music for nearly an hour.

‘I suppose there are more exciting things to do at a ball than talk to some old lady,’ I allowed him with a gentle laugh, for I knew that children often grew bored, and felt trapped by having to talk to an adult. ‘Wouldn’t you like to go and steal some more candied orange from the kitchens?’

‘I would,’ he said, and looked a little uncomfortable, and then said, ‘but not on my own. I only wish there were more children in Thremedon I was allowed to talk to. I like the buildings and all the paintings and horses and huge carriages, and the Bastion and the Basquiat are both very fine, but I have no one to play with like I do at home.’

‘Who are you friends with at home?’ I asked him. ‘What games do you play.’

His small face lit up, and in much less formal tones, he began to tell me all about his life in the manor, away out in the countryside, where there were huge old grumpy carthorses to ride instead of Thremedon’s fine young geldings, and haylofts to play hide-and-seek in, and bulls that he and the farmboys liked to tease as a test of courage. ‘But not so many libraries,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘I don’t like poems so much - ugh - but I like sums! I like geometry especially, but we only have a few books about it. And I like history stories! I like it when there’s rebellions, or when there’s wars and everyone dies and then a brave general saves the day. I want to be a general on a white horse, and to have a huge sword enchanted against my enemies. I want to fight the Ke-Han!’

He had been well-trained: even when Antoinette finally noticed us and came to fetch him away, her face so impassive that I knew she was very upset, he did not address her as _mother_ , but by her name.

‘You are a very brave and clever boy,’ I told him, by way of goodbye, and took his hands, smiled at him. ‘I hope that you make good use of that. You could serve your country well, I think.’

‘It would be an honour, Your Highness, to contribute anything at all to Volstov,’ he said, in a child’s earnest tones, at which Antoinette visibly rolled her eyes and had him escorted away by a servant.

‘He is a fine young man,’ I told her, quietly, and sincerely, over the swelling music. ‘You should be proud of him: have him installed at court, train him up, perhaps, not hide him away in the country. He could do great things in Thremedon.’

I had never seen her face so closed-off. All her usual poise and allure had vanished: she eyed me warily and tight-lipped. She thought that I was goading her, I realised, quite suddenly: she thought that I was trying to be cruel to her, that I was waging some subtle war on her by stealing her child’s favour. I wanted to tell her that I loved her son, that I pined for any children, that I did not begrudge her his parentage. There came that familiar rustling, black-amber touch of her magic to the corners of my mind as she reached out in utter confusion: then, as she saw my thought, she turned away, somehow angry.

Aloud, she said, ‘He is nothing of yours, Anastasia. I would be most obliged if you dropped the subject. I hadn’t - I hadn’t intended for you to meet him.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

I had often before thought how useless it was to call her eyes simply ‘dark’ - there was a great light of clarity in them at times, so that even when she was angry, she seemed to have something of the sun in her face. Still she kept her lips pressed tight, her fists clenched at her sides. ‘I had thought,’ she said, finally, stiffly, ‘that you would be - upset. I would have liked to protect you from that, at least. I see that once again, I have misread you.’

She did not speak to me for months after that.

Although she loved Dmitri well enough, she never favoured him unduly, which, honestly, was worse than the thought of her rearing up some bastard to supplant his father and take the throne. A child borne by a cunning would-be queen to play the knight in a long political game of chess I could have understood. A child born out of love was unforgivable.

*

There was a chessboard that belonged to Nico - a beautiful thing, sent as a gift together with a particularly obstinate Ke-Han ambassador. Very little had been achieved in those talks, and I had reason to suspect that there had been a complete breaking down of negotiations, due in part to the fact that we had so very few skilled interpreters in those days, although Antoinette did her best. Still, the chessboard remained in Nico’s day chambers, a topic of astonished conversation among all his visitors for the next few weeks, which did little to soothe his mood.

‘Well, it’s not as though they’ll even _try_ to see reason, now is it?’ he snapped, one day, after he and six or seven of his favoured margraves had spent the afternoon muttering together about things they were all quite certain I wouldn’t understand, while I sat quietly in a corner and embroidered, while Adeline and Claudette sorted my silks. ‘That’s enough for one day. Somebody do _something_ to take my mind off this.’

‘Have a game of chess, Majesty,’ the Wildgrave Ozanne suggested. ‘It’s certainly a fine board - you may as well make use of it.’

Nico flung himself onto a couch opposite me, petulant as he only was in the company of his nearest advisors: while seated on a throne his face was never anything but composed and confidant, full of his own power, but in private he was prone to fits of ill-humour and bitter discontent. ‘Oh, someone else play the wretched thing,’ he said. ‘I can’t think straight just now. Antoinette, won’t you play a game or two?’

Smiling, she separated herself from the little knot of margraves and bobbed a little curtsy at him as she walked past: his eyes followed her lazily. ‘I shall be glad of the opportunity to slaughter _somebody_ ,’ she said, taking her seat at the chessboard. ‘I don’t suppose any victims will offer themselves up willingly?’

‘I think they’re all far too aware of your particular skills, my lady,’ Nico said to her, in a wholly innocuous voice that nevertheless had me clutching tight at my sewing as there came a loud and not very pleasant laugh. I didn’t dare look up, but remained in my corner, hoping to be ignored as I always was. ‘Ana, love,’ Nico called, so that I flinched, ‘you can play, can’t you? Come, put aside your sewing or whatever it is and show us your edge.’

There came a smattering of applause as I rose, blushing furiously, and took my place at the table opposite Antoinette, Nico dashing to pull my chair out gallantly. I suppose to him it was a fine affirmation of his power to be able to pit his wife against his mistress, and know that neither of us could refuse him. He stooped to kiss me loudly on the cheek for luck: but his eyes locked with Antoinette, and I knew that the smirk about his lips was not for me.

I set my jaw and said nothing.

The board was a lovely thing: one set of chessmen carved in fine sea-blue jade, the other in red, the board itself laid with alternating squares of lapis and cloudy marble, with secret enamelled drawers where the chessmen might lie in order while not in use. I touched one gloved finger to the head of my blue queen, who seemed to have the shape of a great bird, feathered and clawed and fearsome: longed to strip off my gloves and weigh the smoothness of the little fox-pawns in my palm.

Something touched my mind, and I glanced up at Antoinette in a sudden flash of rage. We had been very courteous to each other over the past few years, settling into an accepted pattern of stiff smiles and empty greetings whenever we happened to have cause to deal with each other, which, thankfully, was not very often. I had thought that she was satisfied with her gains: power, my husband, a child, respect, and in me a rival so weak as to be worth only of the occasional show of pity to assuage her own guilt. If she thought, on top of all this, to win a silly chess game against me through using her mind-magic, all for the sake of showing me up -

Immediately the touch withdrew. Her face remained impassive as ever, that graceful smile never wavering: but her eyes seemed suddenly stricken. My anger only flared at the thought of yet more pity. Seizing hold of a pawn, I set it deliberately down on the board with a sharp _click!_

My heart was drumming loud in my breast, but I never once allowed my hands to shake all throughout that long game. Nico had expected a quick, amusing match, having taken the time once, long ago, to learn that I enjoyed chess, but never to play me, and knowing Antoinette for a prodigious master of the game. A good wife would have lost after putting up a brief struggle, would have laughed prettily at her failure and made a pouting jest out of the whole thing before ceding the board to a more skilled player. A good wife, too, would have produced an heir by now, and I had not managed that. I played aggressively as I knew how, so that several times the watching margraves laughed in astonishment, then sobered abruptly as they understood the implications of my move.

Three hours later, when everyone else had wandered off, and Adeline had fallen asleep in a drowsy Claudette’s lap, and Nico had been called away to more pressing matters, we were still playing. Where she pushed me, I pushed back: where she set her traps, I avoided them with all the skill I had and drew her into my own. We did not speak, but every so often her eyes would flick up to meet mine, at first amused or impressive, then, progressively, annoyed, until at last her dark gaze became unreadable. Those eyes jolted my heart and stole my breath each time they found me, piercing me right through and enraging me. It had been a long time since I had felt true anger. It was an unexpectedly good feeling.

I did not win that first game, though only very narrowly, and that, to me, was in fact a mark of respect more than anything else. She had played me fairly, reigning in her Talent to the utmost, and refusing to allow me the win out of pity. I was exhausted when the match was done, and she little better: she staggered, a little, as she rose from the chair, and her hands shook as she reached to begin packing away the little pieces.

‘Your Highness is extremely skilled,’ she murmured. ‘Where were you taught?’

‘At my aunt’s home, by my great-grandmother and my grand-uncle,’ I replied, neatly. I had not risen, but was sitting staring at my hands, light-headed and dizzy. I felt as though I had taken a fever. ‘I’ve had little opportunity to play against anyone in Thremedon. I am afraid I’ve grown rusty: your win was very impressive.’

‘My win was pure fluke,’ she said. She slid the little drawer closed with a click and stood there: regarded me steadily. ‘I should like to play you again, Highness, if you’ll permit it.’

‘If we play again, I’ll win,’ I told her, quite mildly: for now that I had the measure of her technique, I thought I could very easily best her, given time.

There came a touch to my throat. I stiffened. Sliding one finger beneath my chin, she tilted my head back and back until she could look me in the eye. She was in that moment the sum of all my desires, radiant beyond bearing and a constant ache, and I hated her as fiercely as I loved her. I was utterly helpless before her: I would have welcomed any touch from those hands. If she had moved to strangle me then I should have surrendered instantly: if she had stabbed me in the heart I would only have kissed her in gratitude.

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ she said, softly. ‘But you may try.’

We played three hundred and thirty-two chess games over the course of my marriage to Nico. I wrote the results of each one down in a little notebook: she won a solid hundred and eighty, and I one hundred and fifty-two. Whenever she was in the city, and could spare a few hours for me, we played. It was an odd, formal affair, and one that we kept quiet. We discussed little but the game, though often we accidentally made each other laugh, and had to refocus our attentions on the board. I watched her long slender fingers dart from piece to piece with a fierce avarice, kept my own raw, red hands folded to myself. I watched the candle-light move in her dark hair. I bit my tongue and said nothing.

*

I remember saying, ‘ _Dragons_? Nico, whatever do you mean?’ the first time the idea was broached to me - at which point, of course, the construction had already been tentatively underway for years.

I thought that he was joking, in fact: he had to grow quite angry, and snap, ‘Now, see here, Ana, I tell you I’m perfectly serious! The Ke-Han threat is imminent! We can’t continue this cycle of a few raids on and off every years, then making nice in the peace talks while they plot against us, damned barbarians that they are! Something has got to be _done_!’

‘Yes, but - what do you mean?’ I asked, knotting my fingers together in sudden confusion and blinking up at him. There were deep shadows under his eyes, and his beard was very unevenly trimmed. In the harsh wintry light he looked, for the first time, watered-out: his eyes were nearly red with sleeplessness, and he seemed far too old for his age. ‘Have you built airships? I don’t understand what you’re telling me.’

‘ _Dragons_ , I say, dragons - so far they’ve been small things, little contraptions, but the first true prototype will be finished come spring. Like - like this -’ And he seized one of the little snow globes I kept on my mantelpiece, and that I was forever being presented with, since it had been made known that I collected them. He shook the thing up and down, depressed the small bronze lever at the side, so that the tiny silver fish trapped inside flared to life in a burst of magic and began to flick its jewelled tail to and fro. ‘Clockwork, just like this, powered by magic - warships that will breathe fire! The Cobalts won’t stand in our way anymore, and we’ll have a tactical advantage at _last_ -’

I got up and took the snow globe from his hand, quite firmly: settled it back on the mantelpiece. ‘You’re scaring me,’ I told him. ‘Be rational, please.’

He explained it to me - then, and many other times, hoping, I think, to impress me, seeking some sort of validation in me. I remained sceptical. He called a grand unveiling of his project in the spring, as he had promised: set up a sort of wooden amphitheatre in the shadow of the Basquiat, quite close to the cellars where it was said all sorts of magical experimentation went on, and invited only a select few members of the aristocracy, most of them rich enough to be willing to invest in whatever madcap scheme he ended up revealing, as well as higher-ranking military leaders, most of whom I recognised by sight and reputation but had never met. He had Antoinette at his left hand that day, I remember, and myself on his right: we greeted each other cordially, but she turned away before I could press the conversation. Nico kept patting my hand distractedly and saying triumphant, frightening things with a gleam in his eyes: turned every so often to her as though for confirmation of his greatness.

There was an explanation of the spectacle we were about to see provided by some thin, nervous-looking magician: the madwoman Sarah Fleet stood behind him in her work-leathers, tapping her foot all the while and frowning like a thundercloud. We were told not to be alarmed: we were told that we, a select few, were witnessing what would someday be the salvation of Volstov, the way forward into the future, a miracle of magic and technology. I grew very bored of his grandstanding after a while, for it contained no pertinent information at all, and was moreover the sort of thing that Nico spouted three times a day, and that he would likely have had me recite in bed if he had thought I would allow it. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Antoinette glancing at me, a faint grin on her lips: but on meeting my eyes, she closed her face up and looked away. The thin spring sunlight glinted on the badge at her breast. I flushed.

At first, I didn’t understand that the strange moving thing emerging from the cellar door into the shade of the oaks was a dragon. I heard only a great scraping clamour, as of steel sheets being hauled over stone, and smelt something sharp and unpleasant as sulphur on the air: looked down into the courtyard and saw an odd, writhing heap of scrap metal. Part of it darted out into a ray of sunlight and glinted once before retreating into the shadow. There came a murmur of astonishment from the assembly. Fleet lumbered down into the courtyard, strapping on a pair of thick leather bracers as she did so: swore quite abominably at what I still thought was a pile of old tin. Then its head shot out into the sunlight. It wriggled forward with a tremendous clangour, neck swaying stiff as a snake’s, jaws flashing and flashing.

‘You see, Ana?’ Nico whispered to me, twining his fingers with mine, pressing a quick kiss to my temple. ‘I told you, didn’t I? _Dragons_.’

The thing was goaded out into the full sunlight by two handlers with long pole, cowering and whining all the while. It was barely longer than a good-sized dinner-table, and stood perhaps four or five feet off the ground at the crest of its strange, plated neck. Despite its small size, I knew that it must weigh a half-tonne at the very least, and was very glad that it seemed unable to move quickly, for I judged that at any considerable speed it would offer a brunt equal to that of a warhorse: easily enough to trample a man, or to destabilise the flimsy wooden stands of the little amphitheatre.

The woman Fleet approached it, raised one leatherclad arm in time for it to grab it in its jaws and worry it about like a puppy with a rat: she swore at it quite affectionately, then clobbered it over the head. It appeared to like this, for it rubbed its head against her so violently that she fell over: got to her feet again and gave it another good wallop. It settled down at her side.

Nico clapped and clapped. ‘Have it breathe fire!’ he demanded, rising from his seat to lean down over the railings of the impromptu amphitheatre. ‘Fleet! Show them the fire!’

‘Not ready for that, yet, boss!’ she bellowed back up. ‘You saw the tests yourself!’

‘You promised me a firebreather!’ he cried. ‘Do it! Do it _now_!’

‘You are in a _wooden fucking arena_ ,’ she said, quite loudly, but turned to the dragon all the same, let out a long, clear whistle that carried an eerie weight of magic. The dragon swung it head up, seeming to blink: then spat out a few sparks of fire that began luminous blue before fading to a steadier red. It hiccoughed: shook its head irritably, belched smoke.

Shouts of amazement and fear went up from around the amphitheatre. ‘Again!’ Nico cried. ‘Again!’

The Fleet woman seemed extremely disgruntled, but whistled once more, gave the thing a sort of rough but affectionate clout on the back of the neck. It snapped at her, and she backed away instantly, shaking her head at two of the other handlers, who advanced carefully and with their leather-bound prods. All of a sudden, however, it seemed to take fright: for it reared up with a great clanking of metal to slam its feet hard upon the ground, and with a cry like that of an injured child let loose a great column of flame.

‘Nothing to be concerned about, Ana,’ Nico assured me, kissing my hand briefly: stood up, seemingly unconcerned by the cries of unease that were echoing around the courtyard, and called, ‘You see? This the future guardian of Thremedon, my friends!’

The little dragon spat sparks up at him. Nico laughed: an uneasy flicker of laughter followed as Volstov’s sternest generals looked down in mild horror. I read in all their faces a great unease. It almost made me smile to see them so cowed. Antoinette was leaning forward, eyes narrowed, an expression of intense calculation in her face as she followed the dragon’s every movement. She must have had some part in its making, I realised, or at least have followed its construction very studiously, for she seemed to read in it the marks of some magic I could not follow.

The dragon flared its fire again in a dazzling flash that invited some applause, and then again: spun around very suddenly to gambol quite close to the walls of the amphitheatre, flamed longer and hotter than ever before. Smoke billowed up black and acrid. Nico sat down, seeming well-pleased, though shouts of amazement and cries of fear continued: ‘Fire!’ everyone was shouting, ‘Fire! Fire!’ He grinned to himself.

‘There’s an awful lot of smoke,’ I said, plucking worriedly at my knuckles. ‘Nico, is everything quite all right?’

‘No need to be afraid, my love,’ he said, with a happy sigh. ‘They know exactly what they’re doing, never you fret.’

But Antoinette had leapt to her feet, moving with terrible purpose. ‘Fleet!’ she half-roared over the side of the arena. ‘Fleet! Shut it down! _Now_!’

The next second, the stands shuddered beneath my feet as the dragon rammed them. The smoke thickened, and the crackle of burning wood became very obvious: there came the sounds of Sarah Fleet swearing quite frantically. Nico had his arm around me, gazing about frantically through the smoke: and then, quite suddenly, he left me, striding instead to the edge of the stands to gaze down at the dragon. I remember clutching frantically to the railings as the stands creaked and began to sag, coming apart beneath my feet. The smoke was so thick that I as having trouble breathing.

It was Antoinette who staggered towards me through the smoke, bundled me up onto my feet: clicked her tongue, as though I were only a nuisance, something she ought to save because her lover would be inconvenienced if I should die. ‘ _Move_ ,’ she said, loudly, and chivvied me towards the rickety makeshift stairs and down into the muddy Basquiat gardens.

I collapsed against an apple tree, choking and retching: she pushed my hair from my face and began to wipe the sweat and the soot from my brow with her handkerchief. Even over the tremendous hubbub bubbling over from the little amphitheatre, we could still hear Nico shouting obscenities at Sarah Fleet, which she matched word-for-word and without the least bit of compunction: there came a long sizzling hiss, and the black smoked thinned as steam began to billow up in its place.

‘At least they listened to me when I told them to have water Talents on hand,’ Antoinette muttered, still stroking my forehead absently. ‘I suppose it could have been worse. No one died this time, which is one improvement. At least Fleet has some sense - oh, my dear, your skirts are getting terribly dirty.’

I looked down at them. They were. Shakily, I pushed myself up against the tree, stumbled: she caught me and did not let go even once I was steady on my feet, but took my hands when I began to wring them and held them.

‘Did you know?’ I asked her. The sunlight moving through the leaves of the apple trees was blindingly bright. The stench of the burning wood was still overpowering. The shouting seemed to be coming from a great distance away: I remember I heard a screech of metal, and a great roar and a _clang!_ , and then silence. My ears were ringing. ‘Did you know that that was what he was doing?’

‘I did,’ she said, levelly, keeping her hands tight on mine. ‘I encouraged him.’

‘He tried to explain it to me - he tried to - _dragons_ \- I just - I thought he was mad!’ I cried, my throat still raggedly  painful from the smoke. ‘Does he mean to use things like that in battle? Against the Ke-Han?’

Antoinette only looked at me. It was like being pierced to the heart by a golden dagger. I bit at the inside of my cheek until it bled. ‘Anastasia,’ she said, as though I were a child, as though I were the most shamefully simplest fool she had ever had to waste her time on, ‘if he could, your husband would move his dragons against the entire world.’

*

They were his downfall in the end, of course, those dragons. He spent so many years building them, insisting that they be better, stronger, bigger, before at last they were unveiled to the public. I was less than flattered when he had one of the first models named after me, although it was meant in good taste. Even after the Corps was destroyed a first time, he was obsessed with rebuilding it, but of course, that came to far less than he had hoped. His injuries from that dark terrible time down in the tunnels were not fatal, and indeed much less dangerous than they could have been, thanks to the healers of the Basquiat.

Four days after he took his hurts, he was moved to his own chambers in the Bastion, where he lay motionless for long hours. Even when he woke, he seemed very groggy: he smiled vaguely to see me, which, in the wake of my betrayal  meant that he could not have been at all lucid. He could not speak much more than a few words, and drifted in and out of a daze for nearly an hour before he fell back into a true sleep.

‘It will be a while before he comes back to us entire,’ a voice warned me from the doorway, and I turned.

Antoinette was there, leaning against the doorframe. The late afternoon light spilled in from the corridor to pool in her hair. Her face had lost the vicious look to it that it had carried in the tunnels: she was in one of her lovely wine-red day dresses, her eyes and lips neatly painted, her velikaia’s brooch pinned as always to her breast. Though thoroughly composed and full of grace, she seemed somehow weary. Her eyes rested a long moment on Nico’s sleeping form before moving at last to me.

‘Come away,’ she said, and held out her hand. ‘There is nothing more that you can do for him here.’

She closed the door on him as he slept and led me away down the corridors, and into the second-best solarium. I went immediately to the four snow globes that stood atop the harpsichord in the corner, wound them all up and shook them, so that their snow fluttered round and about and their magic clockwork parts came to life: a tree whose crystal leaves changed colour through a clever array of magical lights, a castle under snow, a girl with strange silver wings like snowflakes, a sleeping dragon with a red crystal of fire in his bronze jaws. They gave me comfort. I told myself that I did not care that it was childish. I told myself that I no longer cared what she thought of me. I stood a long while with my back to her and watched the contraptions glitter. I had been so careful with them. I had never broken a single one.

 ‘They will not speak of the dragons,’ she said, at length. ‘Of this I have made certain.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, staring down at my hands. ‘If you think that that is the best way to proceed, then I will defer to your judgement.’

She paused. ‘If you think I should do otherwise, it is your place to tell me,’ she said, sounding displeased. ‘You have charge of Volstov. I answer to you now.’

‘I have charge of _nothing_!’ I shouted, and slammed my fist down onto the harpsichord. It gave a great jangling wheeze of complaint: the snow globes toppled, and one rolled clean off the edge and shattered on the floor. ‘Oh, _no_ ,’ I said, suddenly wretched, and knelt to gather up the pieces: pricked my finger on the sharpest of them, watched the blood spread through the white silk of my gloves. Red had never been my colour.

In a moment, she was there beside me. She picked up the shards and folded them up in a corner of the tablecloth nearby: drew out a handkerchief. Taking my hand in hers, she stripped off the glove and pressed the little square of linen firmly to the gash, which was deep.

‘There is a responsibility that rests on you and you alone,’ she said, quietly. ‘You _must_ accept your authority. If you waver, we will be plunged into mayhem. There are twenty-five disgruntled politicians on this very floor who would seize power from you in an instant if you showed the least sign of weakness. You must not let this happen. Volstov will not weather a civil war.’

My cheeks flushed with rage, and my hands shook in hers. I had no more need of my gloves, I supposed dully: I was simply going to have to learn that I could not very well rule an empire while wringing my hands in anxiety every other moment. I wrenched myself from her grip and stood up, stared down at her with all the rage and loneliness I had never before allowed myself to feel surging suddenly to the fore. ‘Considering that you, together with most of the city, have conspired for the past thirty years to keep me as powerless as possible,’ I snapped, ‘I find it somewhat - _grating_ , to have you chide me for feeling useless.’

Her eyes held mine. Slowly, she stood up: crossed to the settee, sat there quietly a long moment. My cheeks were stinging hot and I was battling to hold back tears. I knew she thought me weak. I had always known that.

‘Well?’ I asked, when she said nothing, fairly spinning around in my rage: tears fell, then, but I rubbed them aside without shame. ‘Are you going to deny it? I don’t know if you bank on my being helpless, if you mean to puppet me, too - I don’t know if all of this isn’t just some cruel joke on your part, expecting me to be able to shoulder an empire where I’ve never before been allowed to shoulder anything heavier than a _dress_ -’

 ‘You know everything there is to know about Nico’s policies,’ she interrupted me, steadily. ‘You may not think it, but you do. I know you think that he saw me as an equal, as the confidante that you never were, but that is not true. I understood his thought as little as you did. You are far better equipped than I to take charge - you are young, yet, and well-loved, and beautiful, but most of all, you are underestimated. The people of this city have set you aside again and again. They have no understanding of your true power - yes, because you wore fine dresses, and danced gracefully at parties, and spoke prettily of poetry and song. They never saw your true potential. They will rally to you in flattery, at first, thinking simply to back you for a short time while you remain in power: but after they see how you endure, they will come to fear you. You alone can do this. You alone _must_ do this.’ She paused before continuing: then drew in a deep breath, said, ‘I told you, once, that you deserve to be adored. You deserve also to be heard. The time for that is now.’

‘You could do it better,’ I told her, shaken, but unconvinced. ‘You are - you’re _Antoinette_ , you -’

She shook her head, spread her hands to indicate all her radiant self. ‘I am only a witch in a red dress,’ she said, wryly. ‘I bewitched my way into Nico’s favour with my mind magic, remember? I have only look at a man to know all his worst secrets. I could be a tyrant, perhaps, but never an Esarina. No one trusts me.’

I stared at her a long moment: more beautiful than ever for all the lines in her face, for all the marks of age on her body. She looked back at me with complete calm. I wanted to throw myself at her feet and rage at her: _why didn’t you see me? Why was I nothing to you?_ The ache in my breast, compounded even after all this by worry for Nico that I could not shake, grew crippling sharp, and tears spilled again. ‘ _I_ trust you,’ I confessed in a wail, and began to cry in earnest. My shoulders heaved as I tried frantically to press the tears back from my cheeks. ‘I trust you as I trust none other.’

‘Strange,’ she said. ‘I could have said the same about you.’

Still I could only stare. ‘I will need your help,’ I choked out, after a very long and uncomfortable moment. ‘Please, Antoinette. I cannot - I cannot do this on my own. I cannot - I have been so alone, and so friendless, and now with Nico-’ I shook my head. ‘Even after all this, I can’t stand the thought of his being hurt,’ I said, and began to laugh. ‘Isn’t that strange? He was unfaithful to me, and I meant nothing to him, and yet I still - he was _mine_ , for so long, when I know he should have been yours, and I just - I’m sorry -’ I trailed off.

She said nothing. I pressed my lips together. The sunlight spilled red through the windows and struck the oak floors gold. I breathed in deeply and mastered my tears. They were no use now.

‘You know, of course, that the game we play affords us little room for - for personal friendship,’ she said to me then, lifting her head at last to look me in the eyes. My heart shook. ‘I have regretted that many times, but never so often as I have when thinking of you. Perhaps we were never meant to be allies, but we could easily, I feel, have been friends. If we had been born anywhere else, I do feel that we would have been - dear to each other.’

I swallowed, thickly. ‘You are dear to me,’ I told her.

Still her face did not change, the shadows of the branches outside shook over it as an evening wind began to blow. She might have been a statue cast in perfect bronze, a clockwork doll in a glass globe, for all she was affected by my tears. It was that, more than anything else, that showed me how strong I was going to have to be. This would be the last time I would allow anyone else to see me weeping. She had loved Nico as much as I had, if not more: she, too, was grieving for his hurts, and for his madness. She, too, had so very often been alone. If she could face all I had and worse, and remain strong as she was, then I could, too: and I would prove it to her. No matter how little she thought of me - no matter how little all of Thremedon thought of me - I would prove to her that I had value.

And then she said the strangest thing. ‘I did my best to protect you when I could,’ she remarked, as though it did not matter. ‘Before I met you, I had been prepared to destroy you if you stood in my way. I had hoped that you would be stupid, or cruel, or frivolous. You were none of those things. You were wise and loving and faithful, and because of that I found that I could not stand to wound you. It was out of respect that I never sought to challenge you openly. I did what I could to show you the honour you deserved, even while I betrayed you.’

‘You do not seem particularly ready to ask my pardon for that, by the way,’ I said, still breathing heavily, even though not two minutes ago I had been the one apologising to her.

‘No,’ she said, simply. In the late light her hair shone and shone like dark burnished gold. ‘What good would an apology do? I would not belittle you that way - I would not force empty words from you simply to ease my conscience. You are worth more to me than that.’

I drew in a trembling breath. Slowly, and with the feeling that I was walking to something quite inevitable, and went and sat down beside her on the couch: shoulders straight, chin raised. I found myself wringing my wrists and stopped immediately, folded my hands in my lap and willed them still as white stone. For a moment we watched the bare branches of the trees shiver against the red light of the winter sun. The city was mine now, truly, to do with as I pleased: all her mazy streets and strange shadowy lanes, her shining rooftops and rich gardens. I wanted nothing to do with any of it, but I was coming to see that what I wanted counted for as little as it always had. People would soon come to depend on me. I could shoulder their expectations. I had always done that. I could do it again.

‘You - wanted to show me honour,’ I said, finally. ‘I am - I am worth something to you.’

I watched her shadow nod.

There was nothing between us save the sunlight, and nothing on which to build: half a kiss a quarter of a century ago, a few chess games, and a thousand smaller snubs and ugly rivalries besides. What desire remained still in my heart I made sure to bury over, leaving behind only a child’s worship of a great hero. I had longed for years only to know that she thought well of me, that someone so lovely and so powerful as she could see anything in me that was worthwhile, that someone so brave as she could fear me.

She stirred. I realised, too late, that she had seen my thoughts. ‘Quite frankly,’ she said, ‘I have always been terrified of you.’

I laughed, albeit a little shakily. ‘And I of you,’ I said, turning to her at last. ‘We have that in common, after all.’

She heaved a great and heavy sigh: I saw again how weary she looked, how drawn her face had grown over the past few days. Years and years lay behind us, passing so slow and then so sudden that I had barely noticed their toll on her until it was too late, and she was aged into a stranger before my eyes. Still her hair shone dark as it ever had, showing no sign of grey, and her gaze was the same clear brown as always, the particular colour of that strange light that runs before thunder. She lifted her hand to my face. The touch of her was like strong wine. She saw how I trembled and smiled wryly: ran her thumb very gently across my cheek.

‘Will we be friends, now, you and I?’ she asked, and pushed the tears from my eyes when they threatened to start again despite my best efforts. ‘Come, now, my dear, no more crying. Tell me: will we be friends at last, and go into our old age together?’

I could have said _I should like that_ or _if you permit it_. I did not. I kept my shoulders very high and my hands very still. I should have longed to kiss her - even then, and likely for always - but I did not. This alone I would not break. This I would preserve, and the city with it.

Instead, I offered her my hand, in the old, regal, gesture. She was surprised, I think, but she took it willingly enough into her own warm, steady fingers, and raised it gently to her lips: kissed it. It was a pledge of fealty, and a sign of great honour. It was enough. It could only be enough.

I said, ‘We shall be friends.’


End file.
